A reluctance to address the contentious issue of foxhunting is dividing the
Tory party

Cast your eye around David Cameron’s Cabinet and you’d struggle to find two more rural Tories than the Prime Minister and his Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson. Mr Cameron loves to disappear to a remote Scottish island for his summer holidays, while Mr Paterson is famed for keeping pet badgers. But this week, this pair of countryside Conservatives were forced to admit defeat in a long-running rural battle.

“I regret to say that I do not think there will be Government agreement to go forward,” Mr Cameron told MPs at Prime Minister’s Questions, when he was asked whether ministers were going to use a statutory instrument to relax the Hunting Act. This would have allowed farmers to use up to 40 dogs to flush foxes out of dens for shooting.

Nick Clegg phoned the PM on Tuesday afternoon to tell him the Lib Dems could not support the amendment, arguing that it went far beyond the promise in the Coalition Agreement to “bring forward a motion on a free vote enabling the House of Commons to express its view on the repeal of the Hunting Act”.

That might seem fair enough, especially if ministers do make good that promise of a free vote. That way the Government would avoid breaking a promise and the Tories would give the impression to rural voters that they still cared about this issue.

However, while the Lib Dems say they are happy to hold that vote, the Conservatives aren’t. As a No 10 source says: “The hunting lobby don’t want a Commons free vote at the moment: it would set back the cause, as they’d lose it.” And in any case, the chances are that few MPs will change their minds on this issue before 2015.

Many Conservatives in marginal constituencies are relieved that the issue is being dropped. “It would be a distraction,” says one. Another, even though he supports repealing the “illiberal” act that he feels has hurt his rural constituency, says: “The last thing we need when Labour is waging daily class war on the Etonians is to start talking about foxhunting.”

Mind you, this unwillingness to address the issue enrages other pro-hunting MPs. One snipes that “a lot of these people, like Amber Rudd, who are expressing concern about the impact on the election, expressed no such concern when they were happily soliciting support from the hunting lobby in 2010. They will not lose a single vote on this issue, and besides, we regularly vote for unpopular policies on defence and pensions that really do affect our constituents. But when we try to do something with a tiny statutory instrument, they panic at the thought of some bloke in a fox suit.”

Pro-hunting MPs also think ministers have been putting off doing anything about relaxing the Hunting Act. While it’s difficult to find a Conservative who will criticise Mr Cameron’s own commitment to rural issues (and that is truly impressive when there are so many Tory MPs who normally find fault with everything about the Prime Minister, down to his choice of socks), the one thing that does irritate backbenchers is that there wasn’t more movement on this from the Environment department earlier.

The Countryside Alliance has emailed members saying “there has been no official response to the proposal, to our knowledge no statutory instrument (the means by which the law could be amended) has been drafted, and certainly the process of taking an amendment through Parliament had not even seen the starting grid”.

At least with contentious issues that upset some voters, such as gay marriage, ministers had the wisdom to pursue reforms with enough time before the election for some of the heat to fade away. On hunting, however, the heat remains – and increasingly, this issue is becoming something that even rural ministers recognise is safer not to discuss at all.